Hungry Ghosts give us Wine

Yesterday we did the feeding the hungry ghosts ritual, a tibetan space clearing used in BTB Feng Shui. As soon as we finished, Ollie was hanging over the railing of our back porch looking down on us, asking if he could help himself to a drink. When we unpacked the bottles we had bought at the (fancy new) liquor store where we had stopped for the express purpose of buying the rum for the ritual, there were two bottles of wine that we hadn't picked out and didn't seem to have paid for. A gift of gratitude from the hungry ghosts who knew they were about to be fed? We drank the most expensive one, a montepulciano and this morning my lips are dry and stained in patches, and I have a headache that started pretty early into the night, but my eyes seem larger than usual. I think going out for coffee is the best thing to do, maybe from there I will even make it to my studio to start pouring wax into my pieces for Open Studios.
I am so thrilled that my dear friend Lourdes de Leon is coming to visit this weekend (I have some good tequila that has been waiting for her). She is responsible for linking me up with my Tzotzil Mayan family, and I get somatic memories of smoky Chiapas morning air when I realize that our connection stems from that place. Lourdes just published an award-winning book about language socialization in Zinacantan called La LLegada del Alma. How is it that a child becomes a self, a social being? I wish psychologists and anthropologists would talk to each other more. It is spring break at Harvard so I get a break from Social Cognition class. The longer I stay as an auditer the more interesting material for conversation I acquire. Kami is really suspicious of the whole conscious/unconscious divide that social psychology is embracing these days. The whole "the mind is a machine with no driver" concept doesn't sit well with me, I wonder where, in that case, creativity, or a sense of fulfillment, or meaning in life at all could exist?

march snow

My friends have been telling me I should start blogging for awhile, "because you have such an interesting life," so I'm finally doing it. I resisted at first, because I thought I had a limited supply of writing in me, and I thought writers wrote in order to (eventually) get paid for writing. Why give it away for free? But then I realized that there are a lot of people out there hungry to read about other people's even relatively boring lives, so why not mine? It's time to get on the bandwagon.
I'm at my internship volunteer job at Cultural Survival. I have been trying to see if I can figure out what kind of equipment is used for low power radio broadcasting, so that I can guess at what the Spanish items are that the community radio stations in Guatemala have listed that they need, so that I can potentially find them online and help them try to get equipment cheaper than they can in Guatemala. Nobody on this end of the project has the technical know-how to do this, so it's all one big experiment- and I'm the one dinking around. Outside the sun is bright but there are piles of snow everywhere. I'll walk over to the Cambridge women's center for my shift soon, answering the helpline and facilitating a certain order of things there, as someone has to at all hours. Sometimes I want to quit all this running around, but on the days when I don't do it, I feel lethargic and sometimes can't even make myself go dink around at my art studio, or at home either. I become a listless consumer of my free subscription to Yoga Journal and no longer think I could write better articles. I think I'm getting over my temporary aversion to yoga. A Mexican friend in my dream asked last night, "How do you think a bioenergetic approach to yoga would go over?" I was so proud of him for being on top of this.